Gertrude Stein and Vichy: the Overlooked History

In “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s latest paean to the way things were, the handsome Allen stand-in, Gil Pender, is a Hollywood screenwriter seeking the artistic big time with a first novel about a man who owns a nostalgia shop. Gil’s longing for the past sends him, in evening gusts, back to nineteen-twenties Paris. Cole Porter croons, Josephine Baker dances, and experimental writer and transatlantic tastemaker Gertrude Stein makes tastes. Gil rushes through yellow-lit streets to get his manuscript in her hands, for who better to ask advice from than Gertrude, intellectual missionary and artistic patron—a woman the journalist Alan Riding calls the “eccentric matron to the ‘lost generation.’ ”

Back here in the present day, in Woody Allen’s home town, tourists are celebrating expatriate life in Paris with visits to “The Steins Collect,” an exhibition that made its way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after stops in San Francisco and Paris. The show presents two hundred works amassed by Gertrude, her brothers, Leo and Michael, and Michael’s wife, Sarah, who were the earliest collectors to recognize the talents of painters like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

The collection is a joy to behold—the Timescalled it a “Movable Feast for the eyes”—and the many photos (including a to-scale projection) of Gertrude’s and Leo’s Rue de Fleurus salon begin to capture what it must have been like to see Fauvist mad hats, cubist decoupage, and lascivious odalisques juxtaposed just so. Our collective public imagination seeks to inhabit the Parisian avant-garde milieu that the Steins did much to create; but in idealizing it, we often gloss over the unpleasantness of Fascism brewing in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. The seduction of nostalgia might also help to explain the Met’s peculiar omission of an important fact in the exhibition’s accompanying catalog and text. “The Steins Collect” leaves out any mention that Gertrude—easily the best-known of the collecting Steins, and a transgressive, lesbian Jewish writer famous in her own right—did work on behalf of France’s Vichy government, which collaborated with the occupying Nazi forces. This is troubling, since the show goes beyond the impressive collection to present the family itself, its history and cross-Atlantic hoppings, and its eminent position within le Paris des artistes.

Many American visitors may not know of Stein’s affiliation with Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the collaborationist Vichy government, whom Stein’s partner, Alice Toklas, called Stein’s “dearest friend during her life.” In 1941, at Faÿ’s suggestion, Stein agreed to translate a set of speeches by Marshal Philippe Pétain—a hundred eighty pages of explicitly anti-Semitic tirades—into English. (She hoped that they would be published in America, although they never were.) In her preface to the translation, she compared Pétain with George Washington as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of countrymen.” But enough people pointed out the exhibition’s exclusion of these crucial facts that several officials, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, requested that Stein’s collaborationist activities be addressed as part of the exhibition. The Met agreed on Wednesday to add a few sentences to the text on the wall, and to direct patrons to Barbara Will’s “Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma,” published last fall.

It would be easy to chalk up Stein’s endorsement of Pétain to her gratitude toward Faÿ, who shielded her from persecution during the war (Stein and Toklas, both Jews, stayed out of the capital and in the countryside throughout the fighting), or to her political cunning. But her enthusiasm for Pétain, who was responsible for the death and deportation of nearly eighty thousand French Jews, was nothing new. After she met Faÿ—the first professor of American studies in France and a friend of Pétain—in 1926, she increasingly warmed to his political thought, writing to him once that she “sees politics but from one angle, which is yours.” Stein felt it vital for artists to work in undisturbed serenity in a climate of political stability; on the day, in 1940, that France fell to the Nazis, she published a book in which she wrote, “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.” When Pétain came to power stressing honor and “peace” in “daily living,” and signed an armistice with Hitler, she exalted: Pétain has “achieved a miracle,” and enabled the French “to make France again.”

Barbara Will, a professor of English at Dartmouth, published her book about Stein’s propaganda work with Faÿ after the Steins exhibition had been launched in San Francisco. But Janet Malcolm’s “Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice,” which details the complex, even perverse undercurrents of the women’s romantic union and grippingly unveils the extent of their relationship with Faÿ, has been on bookstore shelves since 2007, and Alan Riding’s “And The Show Went On,” a thorough and disturbing examination of cultural life in Nazi-occupied Paris, was published the year prior to the exhibit. Besides, as Riding told me, Stein’s wartime activities had long been known.

I spoke to Barbara Will on Wednesday about the Met’s omission of Stein’s wartime collaboration. “In a sense,” she told me, “the curators dropped the ball by not recognizing and anticipating this response,” though she pointed out that the exhibit focusses on art collected before the First World War. Though, “if one asks how and why this art survived the war,” and “specifically, the art in Gertrude’s collection—then the issue of Gertrude Steins’s Vichy commitments becomes very important indeed. Why was Stein’s apartment, where most of the art was stored, left undisturbed during the war? The only firm answer we have—with documented proof—is that Bernard Faÿ kept his eye on the apartment and intervened when it looked like the seals on the doors were going to be broken and the Nazis were going to seize the art works.”

Stein died, in late July, 1946, shortly after a summer-vacation stay at Faÿ’s elegant country home, while he was in prison, awaiting trial for collaboration. (Eventually, Faÿ was sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor, but, disguised as a priest, managed to escape from a prison hospital to Switzerland, where he was pardoned in 1959). Stein was never prosecuted for her collaboration with the Vichy government, and her pro-Fascist ideology is often forgotten by those who hail her as a daring cultural progressive. The fact that Gertrude Stein was a Jew herself likely makes it trickier to lambaste her efforts in support of the Vichy regime. But Will voices the danger of what Fredric Jameson called the systematic “ ‘innocence’ of intellectuals” which, as she puts it, “gives a free pass to those whose work we admire, regardless of the context in which it was written or its ultimate aim.”

I asked Will whether genius could ever justify itself—surely we wouldn’t want to put away Degas’s whirling ballerinas, or stop reading Heidegger, Eliot, Pound, or even Céline, just because their prejudices were bigoted and their politics abhorrent. “ I think we do need to ask ourselves whether our writers and artists should be judged by higher ethical and moral standards,” she told me. “The cult of genius that has dominated our understanding of the artist / writer for at least two hundred years—and which Stein thoroughly subscribed to—may have encouraged a certain exculpability for anything done in the name of creative expression. But the Second World War, as intellectuals like Theodor Adorno and others pointed out, inexorably changed the terms of how we think about art and its role and meaning in society. It made the ethical dimensions of art and the artist much more urgent.”

We look at Stein’s aesthetically radical writing—which, like the work of the painters she patronized, broke down and chewed up conventional lines and structures—and we want to think of her as unerringly progressive. But she wasn’t always an iconoclast in the way we might have wished, and a full evaluation—even appreciation—of Stein cannot ignore these less neat truths. The Anti-Defamation League is right to say that Stein’s “troubling ideology was inextricably linked to her art collection.”

Twentieth-century art, which Stein championed, pushed toward ambiguity and interpretation. The Met does us all a service by adding this omitted information so visitors can judge Stein for themselves.

Photograph of Stein seated before Picasso’s portrait of her, in March, 1930, courtesy of Bettmann/Corbis.